Ranjana Clark is the 43-year-old Executive Vice President and Head of Treasury Division, Wachovia [NYSE:WB], the $63b market-cap banking firm that recently merged First Union into its fold. Clark has played a prime role in this integration-ranked one of the largest and most successful in recent times. She speaks on the issues of leadership:

Towards the end of our interview, when we asked Ranjana Clark what she would do if she weren’t here, she didn’t really seem too sure. As she mused about it, she remarked in the passing that to her, leadership “is not about power, as much as the ability to make an impact in the right way.”

A curious statement, considering that this was the person who was featured in the U.S. Banker’s cover story on “The 25 most powerful women in banking.” Clark recieved this accolade for overseeing the successful merger of Wachovia Bank and First Union, two of America’s larger banks.

Riding Two Elephants
Mergers, whether between large or small interests, are rarely an easytask. The logistics of the exercise alone make the whole thing quite a formidable undertaking.

And as many a failed merger-maker has learned the hard way, it doesn’t stop there. There is this run-away situation of getting the people to work together. Culture shock is as vital an element to take into consideration; and the dividing line between business processes and strategies on the one hand, and the people on the other is at its most visible, a very thin, gray one.

“How you do your work at a company, how quickly you turn things around, what work you focus on,” outlines a voluble Clark, “All these work patterns translate into people’s habits.” In the case of the two banks, First Union was far larger, and had seen far more mergers and acquisitions (eighty five over the last fifteen years) than Wachovia had. All these resulted in a “cultural chasm in the ways the two companies had grown up.”

So there were two parallel tracks, she explains, that the merger was carried out. One was top down—it started with the creation of a eight-member team at the upper echelons, and a high level strategy to decide upon the organizatonal structure of the merged entity, and what Clark terms “target environmental design.” This broad picture was translated into fairly detailed specifications by a functional group that would undertake product-by-product reviews to decide what products would be retained and what discarded; and the same process would be applied to the technology used and the platforms employed—all dovetailed into catering to the extant 600,000-plus customers’ needs, without losing a beat. The message, she says, was that the customer was never forgotten in the heat and dust of the merger. “Cost-cutting and speed of execution were certainly important,” she says, “but they were not the driving considerations. This being a merger between equals, made at a low premium, there were no huge costs we had to squeeze out.”

As for the bottom-up exercise, Clark made sure that she was “very visible all the time,” to her entire division—old and new, so that she’d hear from them directly, and they from her. The bottom-up approach also involved ensuring that while the management spent time together plotting, the other employees spent enough time breaking ice.

Hands on, hats off
But this two-way strategy, we gather, wasn’t restricted to the merger alone. She had been practising this “mantra” for ages. “I tend to be a fairly hands on involved manager,” she confesses. While she’s all out in the captain’s cabin charting the course to navigate, she is never above dropping by in the forecastle to spin a yarn or swig a shot of “the-brew-with-the-crew.”

“I like to articulate the future for the business so that my people understand it. I propose and candidly debate directions, ensuring a clarity of method in the plans. As long as people know they are heard, they tend to trust in you and reveal deeper knowledge that I value highly.”

All this hints at a basic belief in the good nature of people. “I believe that people always want to do a good job and work hard. But the key is to make sure they are well suited for the roles they are placed in—the right people for the right job.” Developing people, with inspirationally stretched targets (that are still achievable), and appropriate rewards are the follow through, which, as as any sportsman will tell you, is vital.

Ranjana Clark
The Wachovia treasury head hails from Calcutta, where her father worked for the government. She grew up in New Delhi, where she did her Bachelors degree in Economics. This was followed by an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad from 1980 through ‘82.

Following this, she worked with the Deutsche bank for six years. Sometime then, she was subject to two desires: she wanted to “go back to school” to pursue a program in finance, and two, live in a different country, a different culture. These two desires were aptly realized with a second master’s degree from Fuqua at Duke. She worked in industrial banking in Meryll Lynch during her summer, when she met her husband, Dr. Michael Clark. After stints at the Winston-Salem offices of Wachovia, she moved to corporate headquarters in Charlotte. Clark has been with the bank since 1989.

Today, she heads the treasury division, one of the four main revenue-producing units of the bank, with as eight hundred people directly under her, and many thousands more indirectly servicing the division needs.

Great expectations
One other remark that seemed to stand out was about expectations. Clark believes that expectations should be made quite clear, whether for oneself or for others. “When I’m not clear about expectations, I miss hitting the bullseye squarely.”

Well, her shot at a career, it must be allowed, would have made a sniper envious.